


Accessory After the Fact

by Zeborah



Series: The Time-Traveller's Ex-Husband [2]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Backstory, Names are destiny, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28026168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeborah/pseuds/Zeborah
Summary: Hotch is still trying to deal with the presumed-murder of his ex-wife, and the mysterious escape from a BAU interrogation room of a mysterious woman found at the scene, when the same woman turns up at his door, continuing to insist that she's a time-travelling, regenerated version of Haley herself.Meanwhile Dave suggests following a lead to interview Haley's grandmother Amy Brooks, aka famous novelist Amelia Jessica Williams, who tells them her most fantastical story yet....
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Haley Hotchner
Series: The Time-Traveller's Ex-Husband [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1994980
Kudos: 4





	Accessory After the Fact

It took a long time to put Jack to bed the night of Foyet's death and Haley's disappearance. It was well past ten when Jack finally slept, in Hotch's bed, with Hotch's arms around him. Hotch stared into the dark even longer, thinking about food he was going to have to buy, and clothes -- in just a few months Jack had outgrown all the spares Hotch kept for him here -- and how to retrieve his toys from that house without exposing him to those memories--

The bloody scuff marks on the carpet. The weird flickering light at the top of the stairs. Foyet's furious and bewildered, "But I killed y--you?" The glow still fading from the mystery woman's skin. _He killed me, and I regenerated. My body just had to change to do it._ Family history he'd never heard in all his years married to Haley. The woman -- with all Haley's speech patterns and mannerisms -- had said it involved time travel. And then the blue box had just appeared and taken...

A knock at the door roused him from thoughts so muddled they might as well be dream.

Carefully Hotch extracted his arm from under Jack's head and slipped off the bed. The clock shone nearly midnight; everything was silent. He doubted suddenly that there'd been a knock at all. He'd probably been dreaming. Or maybe Dave had news and... what, hadn't wanted to wake them with a text?

He went out anyway to check through the peephole. It wasn't Dave. It was the young Black woman.

He spared a thought for his gun, in its locker by his bed, and his handcuffs. (That device "Agent Smith" had used to unlock the woman's cuffs with one buzzing touch.) He thought of Jack sleeping, and how he couldn't risk waking him with the noise of an arrest, or leave him alone if it turned to a pursuit. Then he opened the door on its chain.

The woman looked as energetic and youthful as before. More youthful, even, with her hair now in microbraids: he wouldn't have put her much past twenty. "Hi," she said with a tense smile that instantly faltered. "Oh. Too soon?"

He couldn't tell if he was more furious or incredulous. "It's been seven hours."

"Seven..." She looked in shock at the watch on her wrist, a bulky thing of chrome and leather. It didn't match the breezy A-line dress she wore -- which in turn was more suited to a summer day than this late November midnight hour. "Aaron, I'm sorry. I meant to give you time to talk to Nan."

"Well, so far I've only had time to get Jack to sleep."

"Is he--?"

"He's asleep," he cut in firmly. He shouldn't have mentioned Jack. He shouldn't have opened the door. He should have called 911 and--

The woman pressed out an understanding smile. "What have you told him?"

"Why are you here?"

She swallowed and looked away, marshalling her answer. He already knew what it was, and told himself that was because of the questions she'd been asking, not because he could read her expressions as easily as if they were Haley's.

She wasn't Haley.

"Aaron, I--"

"Mommy!" Jack wailed from the bedroom.

Hotch shut and locked the door in one movement. "Daddy's here, Jack. I'm coming."

It took almost another hour to calm Jack down from his nightmare, dry his tears, and soothe him back to sleep. It was almost long enough to forget the look of distress on the woman's face hearing his cry. And his own sleep was restless enough he could almost believe, in the morning, that the whole visit had just been another dream.

*

Dave phoned towards eight, and gave him an update while he tried to coax wheaties into Jack's moping mouth. The number that had called Haley just before their separation had proved a dead-end; Dave didn't provide more detail and Hotch didn't ask. The clothes had definitely been Haley's. They hadn't been able to isolate the mystery woman's DNA: even a swab they'd taken from her had been contaminated with Haley's.

As he listened, Hotch felt an odd sense of dancing around the elephant in the room. "What about Agent Smith?"

"Who?"

"The man who... helped her escape. He had DOJ credentials." They were fuzzy in his memory, but he dredged up, "John Smith."

"Probably faked, but I'll add it to the APB. We've got warrants out for both of them, obviously."

His gut tightened. This was where he needed to admit the woman had come to his apartment last night. Just... not in front of Jack, who was already worried and nervous about everything. "Hold on a moment, Dave. Jack, can you finish your wheaties while I go into the living room to talk to Agent Rossi?"

"No," he wailed instantly, clutching for Hotch's arm in a move that tipped over the cereal bowl and covered them both in wheaties and cold milk, "Daddy, don't go!"

"It's okay, Jack." He tried to disentangle himself, but with the cellphone in his other hand he was no match for a determined four-year-old. "Jack--"

"Aaron, don't worry about it," Dave said in his ear. "Listen, has Jack ever met his great grandmother?"

The non-sequitur threw him for a moment. "I... don't know. Maybe by phone or Skype. Haley's--" He caught himself on that _is_. Should it be _was_? Or... He shook his head on those thoughts. "The whole family's close. --You want to talk to her."

"I think it'll go a lot better if you're there, and I know you're not leaving Jack alone any time soon, so what do you say to a day-trip?"

He wasn't sure about mixing the case with looking after Jack, but... at the moment he didn't have much option. He put the phone on his shoulder. "Jack, would you like to take a trip with me and Agent Rossi to visit your great-grandma?"

"Will Mommy be there?"

He shut his eyes. It would be so much easier if there'd been a body. "No, Buddy, but we're going to ask some questions that might help us find out what happened to her."

Jack nodded acceptance, and Hotch lifted the phone again. "We'll come."

"Okay, the jet'll be ready to go whenever you can get here. By the way," he added, "don't be surprised if you spot surveillance when you leave. That woman seemed pretty obsessed with you and Jack so we've had agents keeping an eye on your building since yesterday evening."

He frowned. Then how--? "Both entrances?"

"And the fire escapes. No sign of anyone, though. Guess they're laying low."

It must have been a dream after all, he thought as he hung up and fetched a cloth to wipe Jack's breakfast off the table, chairs and floor. Any agents Dave trusted to surveil his building wouldn't have let someone slip both in and out again. Yesterday had been a horrible, horrible day, he and Jack had both slept badly, and he'd just had one more uneasy dream among many.

*

Dave stopped Hotch from knocking on Amy Brooks's apartment door until he'd sent a text. "Morgan and Prentiss are meeting the guy who signed the birth certificates," he explained to Hotch's silent question.

And if there was some kind of collusion between him and Amy, they didn't want one to warn the other. Which meant -- "You haven't told her we're coming."

"Nope." He got an answering text and knocked on the door himself.

"Well, I should warn you she's sharper than she looks and she doesn't faze easily." All the same, springing her grand-daughter's maybe-murder, maybe-abduction on her would be a lot at any age. At least she probably knew about Foyet already: Haley's father would have told her Haley and Jack were in WitSec.

After a long wait, the door opened on an old woman hunched in a scarlet sweater and black slacks too large for her shrunken frame. Her white hair was tied up in a scruffy bun, and her eyes were almost as pale. "Who is it?" she asked. She must be coming up to her centenary but had never lost that Scottish accent.

"Aaron and Jack Hotchner and Agent David Rossi."

"Ah, so Foyet's--" She stopped, thankfully. "And my favourite great-grandson too? Hello, Jack."

He clutched Hotch's hand, uncertain of this stranger who couldn't seem to look directly at him, but managed a quiet, "Hello."

"Oh dear, you sound a lot sadder than when I saw you at Christmas."

"Yeah. Do you know where Mommy is?"

Hotch opened his mouth to explain, but she just shook her head. "Not right at the moment, sweetie, but I know your Dad's going to find her. Just be patient, okay?"

"Okay," he said in disappointment.

At least he wasn't putting too much stock in that rash promise -- but he looked so crestfallen Hotch couldn't help but wonder if it would be better if he did. He squeezed his hand comfortingly and said to Amy, "My team's investigating the case, and there are some questions Agent Rossi and I hoped you could help us with."

"Sure, come on in. Do you like to draw, Jack? I've got some awesome crayons. You just need to put them back in rainbow order when you're done so I can have a turn later." Once Jack was settled with crayons and paper in one corner of the room, she found her way to an armchair at the other end and eased herself creakily into it. "I suppose I should ask what happened."

"Unless you already know, Mrs Brooks," Dave drawled as he and Hotch took the sofa. He'd had a sharp look in his own eye, scanning the rows of her books on the shelves and inspecting the paintings that hung on every wall of the room: some of them fantasy landscapes of strange birds and moons; most of them family portraits.

She laughed. "Please, you work with my ex-adoptive grandson-in-law: we're practically family. Call me Amy."

"You've got a pretty complicated family."

"More complicated than you'll ever know."

"You'd be surprised," he said, leaning forward. "Tell us about Harmony."

Slowly she cocked her head, thinking it through. "You've got the birth certificates. But you won't get anything out of Canton -- I mean, the man's faced monsters from your worst nightmares--"

"So have we," Rossi said ominously.

"Different kind of monsters," she dismissed that with a wave of one thin and tremulous hand. "So --" she turned her head, and if she wasn't looking straight at Hotch it was clear she was addressing him -- "one question: is the only reason you're here to get Agent Rossi in the door?"

He'd started to wonder himself. But he said, "I'm here because a woman we found in the clothes your adoptive grand-daughter was last seen wearing said you knew what was happening. ...And we're practically family: you can call him Dave."

Dave shot him a look of token complaint, but didn't protest.

Amy's eyes stayed fixed in Hotch's direction, piercing for all their blindness. "You trust him?"

"With Jack's life."

She considered, then abruptly agreed, "Okay. Dave, I'm going to tell you about Harmony on one condition: no interruptions, no questions. You asked for the story and if you don't like it that's not my problem. We got a deal?"

He leaned forward to shake her outstretched hand. "It's a deal, Amy."

"Good. Now listen up, boys."

*

So, [Amy said], this involves a bit of time travel.

Oi, mister, don't think I don't hear you opening your mouth. We had a deal. --That's better.

Rory and I were twenty-one, give or take, when our daughter was conceived in... let's call it a time machine. That was the first thing that made her different. The second thing was this woman kidnapped me and... did things to her before she was born. And when she was born, she took her from me and...

This woman, she wanted to kill a friend of mine, the doctor. But he was too powerful for normal people to kill, so she needed a weapon. She took Melody -- that's what we called her then, I named her after our best friend growing up. So this woman took her to Greystark Hall in the 1960s, when it had just been abandoned but hadn't been torn down. She raised her there for six years, brainwashing her the whole time.

And we looked for her, so hard. We looked for her through the whole universe, but we could never find her in time. Even when Rory and I ended up in 1938, and lived through that whole time again, we just couldn't get inside. Maybe if we could have got Canton to help us we'd have had a chance, but he didn't know us yet.

But finally in 1969 she got out. That's another story with time travel, but the point is when we got to 1969 again we knew when to look for her, so we found her before life on the streets got to her. We just had to make sure the woman who kidnapped her didn't find her again, so we called her Harmony. We'd already changed our own names when we came to 1938. And by then Canton knew us, so he helped us with the paperwork.

The thing was, though, she didn't grow. I don't know whether it was because of the time machine energy keeping her young, or because of what that woman did to her, but for ten years she just stayed six years old. Rory called her 'The Girl Who Made Everyone Wait'. She didn't grow, and she didn't remember things -- that part was good, no-one should remember the things that woman did to her. And it gave us time to just _love_ her the way we'd always wanted to, and hopefully teach her not to kill the doctor.

But it made the neighbours suspicious, you know? We had to move a lot. And when she finally started growing again, Rory and I were almost seventy. We couldn't keep up anymore, and Roy and Barbara had already been helping, and Jessica was just a bit older than Harmony... seemed. So it broke our hearts to give her up again, but it was best for her and at least we could still see her.

Canton helped with the paperwork again. She chose her own name that time, which is what you get when you watch Pollyanna too many times.

But you want to know where she is now. So, here's the thing about me: even when time and reality change, I remember the old timeline. In one timeline I grew up next to a crack in time, and that's another story too, but it's what made me different, the same way being conceived in a time machine made Haley different. So I remember what happened to her -- to Melody -- in the timeline when we didn't find her on the streets.

In that timeline, Melody got so cold and hungry and sick that any other little girl would have died. But the time machine energy inside her regenerated her. It just had to change her body to do it. Then the woman who kidnapped me must have found her again. I guess all that regeneration energy was a tipoff. She kept brainwashing her, and she brought her to my time -- my original time. So Melody grew up with me and Rory and became the best friend we named her after.

I told you my family was complicated, and that was just getting started. She wanted to kill Hitler, but _that_ went wrong. That's when I saw her regenerate for the first time, and realised she was another friend -- in fact she was the doctor's wife. But she didn't know that yet, and she was still brainwashed, so she kept trying to kill him. One time... I thought she'd succeeded, and she went to prison for it just to keep his cover. They were married by then, so of course she kept breaking out to go on adventures with him and save the universe.

So we've probably completely screwed up the timeline by giving her a happy life instead. But it was worth it, every second. I always hoped she wouldn't have to regenerate until she got as old as we did -- especially as old as me, [Amy said with a grin and a flicker of grief]. But that's one thing I've learned about life: you can't always stop the monsters in time to save everyone.

*

Dave had got his notebook out when Amy started the story, but by the end of it he'd only written the words "Greystark Hall". After a pause now he added "doctor ?" and thoughtfully recapped his pen. "Well, Amy, thank you for that story."

"Thank you for not interrupting, Dave," she said as gravely.

Hotch felt absurdly as if he were in a school play, his thoughts were turning in such a confused whirl that he'd completely forgotten his own lines. With an effort he took his cue from Dave's notes, pulling himself together to ask, "Can you tell us the name of the doctor you mentioned?"

"Oi," Amy frowned at him. "No questions, remember?"

"Your deal was with Dave," he pointed out innocently. "I didn't promise anything."

"Lawyers," she said with teasing disgust. She calculated a moment. "Okay, here's a deal for you. I can't tell you his name, but I'll give you a picture of him if you answer one of my questions."

"Deal," he agreed.

"Jack," she called, "can you go into the bedroom, through this door here, and fetch me the big picture on the drawers next to the bed?" She listened as he went, then when they were alone leaned intently towards Hotch. "So Foyet tried to kill her, didn't he? --That's not my question. Foyet tried to kill her, but she regenerated so you found another woman in her clothes and you arrested her. My question is: what's the _exact time_ someone broke her out of there?"

He stared at her blankly. Of all the questions... How had she known...? But surely there was no harm in answering it. "Yesterday," he said. "In the afternoon at four twenty-five."

"Four twenty-five," she repeated, and felt on the side-table beside her for the cellphone leaning against a bronze figurine of a Roman soldier. With a shaky but practiced swipe she told it, "Finish that last book, and make sure the doctor comes at 4:25pm on the 25th November. Back already, Jack?" she added, setting the phone down again. She took the picture he carried and felt the frame. "Yes, that's the one."

She handed it across to Hotch. It was a collage in watercolours of a dozen faces. "That's me and Rory in the middle, of course," she said. "My Mom and Dad and Aunt Sharon in the top left and our boys in the top right. And on the bottom there's Melody and the doctor."

That wasn't quite right, though. On the bottom there were four people: a baby, swaddled in white; a middle-aged woman in black sunglasses, red lipstick, and wild blonde curls; and, grinning wickedly, the young Black woman from yesterday and last night. The fourth, presumably the doctor, was yesterday's "Agent Smith", complete with red bow tie.

As Hotch stared at it numbly, Dave asked, "Can we borrow this?"

"Aaron can," Amy said. "I'm leaving most of my paintings to Haley anyway."

They didn't stay long after that. Aaron helped Jack pack the crayons up in 'rainbow order' and gathered the drawings he'd made (a yellow-haired stick figure, two other stick figures fighting, and a final stick figure very small in a box in a corner) together with the framed collage.

"Give an old woman a kiss before she shuffles off this mortal coil," Amy ordered as she showed them to the door. She laughed when Dave kissed her hand, and punched him playfully in the chest. Hotch gallantly kissed her cheek and found her arms wrapped bonily tight around him. "He doesn't believe me in the slightest," she whispered in his ear, "but you do, don't you?"

Time travel and regeneration; a baby brainwashed to murder a grown man, and a six-year-old who didn't grow for ten years. How was he supposed to believe any of that was Haley?

Except she had loved Pollyanna, and he remembered the school once in a flurry of excitement because she'd fainted in art class and when she woke up she'd forgotten the entire day.

And the woman wearing her clothes had _glowed_.

"Just... the slightest," he murmured back.

"It's a start," Amy told him. She squeezed him as tight as an old woman's skeleton allowed, then stepped back. "Rory and I separated once," she confided. "That was a bad time, but not as bad as the times he died. But the universe has a way of throwing people back together."

*

Back out on the street, Dave checked a text message. "Well, she was right about one thing: we're not getting anything from Canton Everett Delaware the Third."

The man was legendary for getting kicked out of the Bureau and then foisted back into it following his successful leadership of some secret presidential task force; Hotch wouldn't have expected him to be a pushover. He was more preoccupied by all the sheer impossibilities this case kept throwing up. Like a painting of two people by someone who should never have seen either of them. "This collage has to be at least ten years old, probably more. Even before she went completely blind, her hand wasn't steady enough for water colours."

"Someone must have faked her style. She illustrated her own books, didn't she? They were pretty popular."

So Haley's stalkers broke into her grandmother's apartment to plant forged portraits of themselves by the blind woman's bedside? Hotch couldn't remember ever feeling so frustrated by following the logic of a case. "You know, Dave, we can't keep ignoring the fact that someone just _appeared_ in the middle of the Bureau yesterday and spirited a woman away into thin air."

"Aaron, he had to get through a _lot_ of people to pull that off, and after the day you had yesterday you're the last person anyone's going to blame. If the BAU gets any heat for it, Morgan and I will field it."

He shook his head incredulously. "I'm not worried about my _career_ \--"

"And we're not worried about ours," Dave said firmly. It wasn't quite chiding, but it did make Hotch aware of how quiet Jack had gone, tight by his side. "Now, I'm going to check out this Greystark Hall. Why don't you and Jack go visit your brother and we'll meet back at the jet around four?"

Hotch opened his mouth and shut it again. It wasn't like he _wanted_ to believe in a teleporting blue box. (Or time travel? Regeneration?) "Well," he said, trying to rein his roiling emotions back into some semblance of calm -- for Jack's sake if no-one else's -- "I do appreciate how you're just quietly taking me off the case."

Dave relaxed into a smile. "And I appreciate how you're letting me. See you at four."

Sean didn't answer his phone. Hotch considered leaving a message, but Jack was with him and was too young to hear that kind of language. So instead they got pizza for lunch by themselves and spent the afternoon at the Central Park Zoo.

It was near winter, but the sun made the chill air bearable. At first Jack didn't pay attention to the animals: he only looked hopefully at the face of every woman passing by, and nervously at the face of every man, and either clung to Hotch's hand or begged to be carried. It didn't take much begging, either. Hotch had lost Haley yesterday; he wasn't going to lose Jack today, even for a second in the crowd.

But even anxious for his mother, Jack was still a four-year-old boy, and eventually the animals won him over. By the time the seals were being fed he had only eyes for them, and Hotch had to keep a hand on his collar to keep him from ducking and darting among the other parents and children for a better view.

And then he realised they were being watched.

Reflexively he scooped Jack up into his arms. "Daddy!" Jack complained for the three seconds it took him to squirm into a better position to see the seals.

Hotch scanned the crowd tightly, and found her standing under a tree: the young Black woman, in the same dress she'd worn last night and a man's suit jacket -- _his_ jacket, he'd have sworn for a moment, but how could she have his jacket? How could she _be_ here, watching them? Even Dave didn't know they'd come here. Granted she'd been the one who'd told them to talk to Amy: could she have been waiting to tail them from the airfield without either of them noticing?

Without taking his eyes off her, shifting Jack's weight onto one arm, Hotch reached for his phone. He took mental stock of the exits and where he'd most likely find security guards, and the very calm tones he was going to need to speak in so he wouldn't frighten Jack.

Meanwhile the woman met his eyes with a sympathetic smile. She lifted her wrist, poked at her watch, and disappeared.

Hotch's thumb froze on the 9. Where-- His eyes darted to other trees and back again. He'd been _watching_ her. He hadn't so much as _blinked_. He scanned the crowd, thought he saw her, and realised it was someone else. Where had she gone?

Or had she been there at all? Was the stress of the last few months catching up with him? Was that why Dave was acting as if no blue time machine had interrupted yesterday's interrogation: because it hadn't?

He shut his eyes and slid his phone back into his pocket. It was just stress, then. Which was a little bit terrifying, but -- if it was just stress, then he just needed to step it down a notch. He just needed to let Dave handle the case while he focused himself on his son, and sooner or later everything would start to make sense again.

"Look, Daddy, look!" Jack shrieked in delight.

He opened his eyes, kissed his son's hair, and watched the seals being fed.

*

It was a relief to get home and find all his jackets accounted for. Besides, surveillance was still on his building: if someone had tried to sneak in to pilfer his wardrobe, they'd know about it.

The weekend was full of shopping trips, punctuated with trips to playgrounds, naps, and meltdowns if he wasn't quick enough to enforce the naps. The effort it took just to cook and keep up with housework had tripled. Jack obsessively watched an old video of his birthday party because Haley was in it, and had nightmares every night; fewer if he slept in Hotch's bed.

He did his best to leave the case to Morgan and the team. He was called in on Monday afternoon for the inquiry into his shooting of Foyet, but that had been a clean shot and he could honestly say if Foyet had escaped he'd have tried to kill Jack too. When one of the panel tried to ask about the mystery woman's escape, Strauss cleared her throat and reminded them that was out of scope, and in short order he was out again with Jack in his arms.

Haley's sister brought lasagna for the freezer and neither questions nor speculations. She'd always been practical -- more even than Haley, which was saying something. She played with Jack and even made dinner while Hotch got through two loads of laundry, cleaned the bathroom, and leaned against the shower wall with the water beating down on him. When she left she only said, "Just let me know if you... hear anything?"

"Of course," he replied, too grateful for her help to feel stung that she'd fear he wouldn't.

He hadn't heard anything. Dave gave him updates on a daily basis, but none of them included anything worth passing on. Haley's parents had confirmed that Haley was adopted but referred all questions about Harmony back to Amy. Both the woman and her accomplice had disappeared as thoroughly as Haley's body.

On the bright side, he hadn't seen anything either.

That was a bright side, wasn't it? Not seeing things should definitely be a bright side.

*

He was lying in bed with Jack again when the knock at the door jolted his pulse into... hope?

Ridiculous, he told himself, and gathered gun, phone, and handcuffs on his way to answer it. Jack would survive the tumult of an arrest if it got them a clue to finding out what had happened to his mother.

But when he opened the door, the woman was wearing _the same dress_ and he heard himself say in disbelief, "You get microbraids in seven hours but in five days you can't find a change of clothes?"

She gave him a disappointed look, like he'd just told her he had to go in to work on the weekend again. "You still haven't talked to Nan."

"I talked to her," he retorted. She looked at him as if waiting for him to prove it, which was exactly the wrong way around. He challenged her: "What time do I shower in the morning?"

"You shower before you go to bed. So you can pull your clothes on and go if you get a phone call in the middle of the night."

This wasn't helping. _Everything_ between them now was about their crappy relationship.

"Aaron," she said, lowering her voice though they'd already been keeping their voices down, "you told me you thought Elle might have gone to shoot that man deliberately. You told me... some of what Carl Buford did to Morgan, and you told me you thought Reid might be on drugs. Do you really think that I--" She shut her eyes in a long blink and took a breath. "That your wife would tell _anyone_ _any_ of that?"

His heart pounded. _If,_ said a clinical voice in the back of his mind, _if she'd been held and tortured for five days._

But what the hell kind of UnSub would try to compromise Hotch by roping a nonagenarian into a cock-and-bull story about time travel and regeneration, instead of just sending him a video or a finger like a normal person?

The clinical voice in the back of his mind for once had no answer to this.

"Aaron, _please_."

He let her in and shut the door. "He's in my bedroom. Don't wake him." He watched her walk unerringly to his room. Haley had picked Jack up from here a few times, of course: she'd know the layout. But then Foyet had visited too. Hotch's hand hovered near his gun; it just didn't quite touch it.

The woman crept the last few steps to the bedroom door and pushed it open like it was made of eggshell. Her hand went then to her mouth, and she stood a long time, completely still, not even breathing. For a moment he found himself wondering if any of Amy's "other story"s involved robots. Then she lifted her hand to her eyes, took a long breath in, and finally drew the door silently closed again.

"How's he coping with... everything?" she whispered, dabbing one last time at the corner of an eye.

"Up and down," Hotch said. "He liked watching the seals get fed."

She smiled wistfully and took a breath. "Thanks. I've just _really_ missed him."

Haley's inflections in a stranger's voice; a stranger's face wearing her expressions. He stared at her for a long time trying to resolve the contradiction, and couldn't. Finally he said, "There's a warrant out for your arrest."

She looked back at him for a long time, and slowly nodded. Swallowed, and asked steadily, "Are you going to arrest me?"

He looked down at the carpet. He remembered the bloody scuff marks on the carpet back in the house; the pool of blood the woman had been standing in; the blood on her clothes, _Haley's_ clothes -- and her skin glowing. He told her, "They're watching all the exits to the building."

"Not all of them."

He remembered the blue box that Dave had forgotten, or didn't want to acknowledge. Time travel. "Okay," he said.

She nodded again and went towards the door. One hand on the handle, she paused. "What day did you say you went to the National Zoo?"

He frowned. Why was she fishing for information she already knew? "I didn't. I was talking about Central Park." Why had she looked wistful, and now hopeful, when he'd already seen...?

Time travel.

Really?

His eyes fell on the jacket he had hanging on the coat rack. It was the jacket he'd worn to yesterday's inquiry, and hadn't quite got to the drycleaner's today after being covered in Jack's tears. It was also the jacket he could have sworn he'd seen the woman wearing in Central Park.

"It was cold there," he said. "On Friday afternoon."

She followed his gaze to the jacket, checked his face, and slid it off its hanger. "I'll bring it back," she promised. "Sometime."

He lifted his eyebrows at that... quip of sorts. "Sometime," he agreed.

When she'd gone, he locked the door again and went back to his bedroom. Jack was still sleeping peacefully, just as if his mother wasn't time travelling in a stranger's body and his father wasn't aiding and abetting an escaped suspect.

Hotch lay down again and tried to do the same.


End file.
